Convert Pandas column containing NaNs to dtype `int`

Question

I read data from a .csv file to a Pandas dataframe as below. For one of the columns, namely id, I want to specify the column type as int. The probl

Answer 1

Most solutions here tell you how to use a placeholder integer to represent nulls. That approach isn't helpful if you're uncertain that integer won't show up in your source data though. My method with will format floats without their decimal values and convert nulls to None's. The result is an object datatype that will look like an integer field with null values when loaded into a CSV.

keep_df[col] = keep_df[col].apply(lambda x: None if pandas.isnull(x) else '{0:.0f}'.format(pandas.to_numeric(x)))